Biography: Steve Lucco

Steven E. Lucco is currently the chief architect for the Microsoft Browser Programmability and Tools (BPT) team. BPT builds the Internet Explorer’s Chakra Javascript script engine, as well as the Visual Studio tools for creating scalable, efficient Web client applications.

As a development lead and architect at Microsoft, Lucco built a team that designed and prototyped a secure, common-language runtime. This team joined with the JavaVM team at Microsoft and played a key role in the design and implementation of the Microsoft Common Language Runtime. As a senior researcher at Microsoft, Lucco published widely-cited articles on virtual machine design and implementation.

Before he joined Microsoft, Lucco co-founded Colusa Software in 1993 and served as its technical leader until it was acquired by Microsoft in 1996. Colusa shipped to customers including Tandem and IBM a cross-language virtual machine that provided secure execution of both strongly-typed (Java, C#) and weakly-typed (C++) programs.

Lucco received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1994 where he pursued research interests in programming language design and implementation, natural language understanding, and runtime systems for multi-core processors. Lucco has also pursued these interests as an undergraduate at Yale, a researcher at Bell Labs and a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University.